The contents of this essay are based on conversations during the 7th India-US Forum
Space is no longer the domain of just governments since a multitude of state and non-state actors now have access to space. Space-based services support the world’s financial information, communication systems, scientific discoveries, and environmental monitoring. It is increasingly contested and congested and that brings its share of both risks and opportunities.
The Rise of Private Space Industry
The last decade has seen the rise of the private space industry all over the world. The ecosystem expanded further by the creation of the space force and the launch of the Artemis lunar exploration program formally established in 2017. India, in particular, has taken numerous steps forward in the last two years—creation of an independent regulator, announcement of the India space policy, signing of the Artemis Accords, the first soft landing on the moon, announcement of intentions to put a space station into orbit by 2035 and an Indian on the Moon by 2040, and finally the creation of the tri-service integrated Defense Space Agency.
Space has always been a matter of national security. Activities in the domain have been targeted towards protecting and preserving life on Earth via communication, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), early warning systems, and about denying your adversary the same capability. Not much has changed on that score but the rise of the commercial industry has democratized space.
ISRO began breaking down barriers for the private sector two decades ago by hosting launches of satellites built by commercial players. An ecosystem of entities like Planet Labs and Spire who are delivering thousands of datasets every day has changed the landscape of geospatial intelligence. In 2017, when India organized a launch with 70 satellites into orbit, 18 of them were commercial satellites.
Deterrence and Rules of Development
Space is critical to the US, its way of life, and its way of war. The US Department of Defense (DOD) believes that America’s competitors understand how critical space is to the US and intend to disrupt, deny, and degrade their space capabilities in the event of conflict. These competitors are now developing, testing, and fielding capabilities to target the American and allied satellites. China, in particular, is building its space architecture to that end.
In response, the DOD has prioritized cooperation with allies and partners including with India. The US network of allies and partners presents an asymmetric advantage, collectively deterring aggression in space. Neither Russia nor China can match this advantage in the near future.
A race to build space capabilities has increased the need for adversaries to build denial capabilities leading to a renaissance in Direct-Ascent-Anti-Satellite weapons (DA-ASAT) testing.
It may seem like a straightforward step in the production-deterrence loop but defense in space carries a different set of considerations than on Earth. Small shrapnels of debris in space can damage entire satellites and take a long time to degrade, posing a threat to the entire Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The Chinese test, for example, left a couple of thousand pieces of debris that are still in space and they will degrade very slowly over time making testing disruptive and dangerous for all actors in the domain.
In 2022, the US declared a voluntary moratorium on destructive testing to prevent debris. Since then, the US has made efforts to bring like-minded countries as well as Russia and China on board this norm, without significant success. Perhaps the reluctance in adopting this norm comes from the lack of clarity on whether it proscribes the use of DA-ASATs in a conflict.
De-Congesting the Low Earth Orbit
LEO is getting increasingly congested and our methodologies to keep track of this are not absolute. Now space-based sensor networks are able to do surveillance of space from space but by and large it has been surveillance, from land through a radar or a telescope, and the sensor data is sparse. The more assets that get deployed in LEO, the more complicated will be the problem of understanding the behavior of adversary satellites.
Right now, it is all heuristic. It is also made more complicated by the fact that all countries try to mask the existence and capability of their spy satellites. Sensor technology is rapidly growing. In maritime domains, for instance, which are more mature, when a ship comes within a certain radius of another ship it is possible to assess from the approach pattern and other factors whether it is considered hostile. In space, this technology is a constantly evolving capability.
LEO is critical to our way of life, civilian and military. It is incumbent upon all actors in space to model responsible behavior and put pressure on adversaries to do the same.
Disruption and Denial
US adversaries have an interest in disrupting American space capabilities because the US is asymmetrically depended upon in a joint war fight. China and Russia, as of now, are not very dependent on space but China will eventually get there. An obvious pathway is to deny, disrupt, and/or degrade US space capabilities which could be done by targeting either the terrestrial base or orbit base. There are also reversible and irreversible ways to disrupt and deny. Electronic Warfare (EW) jamming is a reversible non-kinetic way to disrupt and deny as witnessed in the Ukraine conflict. The way forward is to build resilience and redundancy to ensure localized jamming doesn’t have a disruptive effect on the entire architecture. For the US, this means leveraging redundancy and resilience with allies and partners.
In India’s case for example, China is pursuing both reversible and irreversible capabilities on the terrestrial and orbital base that can have a significant impact on Indian space architecture. This would have potential military and strategic effects. The US and India have a shared interest in having redundancy resilience and building up capacity to deny China that ability to disrupt American allied operations in space.
India and the US have been doing military exercises in other domains. They should also imagine space exercises which will eventually move the threshold up to RPO, proximity operations, and directed energy weapons.
Innovate – Procure – Rinse – Repeat
The Indian industry lacks imagination. Across DTTI, iCET, and other fora, it’s a failure on the part of Indian industry to come up with ambitious projects. India should be worried because they don’t have enough assets in space. Previously, in times of need, India had to ask allies for packaging and targeted information but that is not a reliable pathway.
India still lags behind on defense procurement, specifically high technology procurement of products at prototype stages with more R&D to go.
Space proves to be a bigger problem for procurement. In the commercial space industry, India moved to small satellites to bring down the cost, enable rapid development, and decrease the cycle of upgrades from 10-15 years to 2-3 years. This has landed the industry in a fast paced environment where the technology is aging rapidly. The procurement timelines from a defense perspective does not match this rapidity. It begins from conceptualization, to an assessment of operational requirements, and then into procurement taking an average of two years by which point the technology has already evolved.
This cyclical Catch-22 can also cause deliverable backlogs from existing space assets. For instance if a country launches a satellite for 15 GB per second connectivity and another country launches one for 70 GB per second the same day, the former country is on the backfoot within a day of having a successful launch. There is an urgent need in India to upgrade procurement methodology from the ground up including bringing down the Request for Proposal (RFP) to a single page.
This problem, however, is not unique to India. Defense procurement is slow and tough across the world in varying degrees.
India faces significant challenges in this regard. From the point at which a manufacturing contract is awarded it would take at least 18 to 24 months to deliver a satellite predominantly because there is no domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
Industrial Innovation Challenges in India
The Indian space industry is indeed growing but industrial innovation is still lacking. India, historically, has been very good at system integration but not so much at developing component-level core technology. While there exist enough contracts to bid for with the Government of India to keep the industry functional, the funding for innovative and ambitious projects is scant. It is not just the government though; the vision in the private sector is also lacking.
In the Innovations for Defence Excellence (iDEX) Challenge for instance, the government provides 50 per cent of the cost of the project in funds and the remaining is on reimbursables. Reimbursables is an unsustainable format since it does not cover operational costs like office maintenance and HR, it only applies to tech expenses. In the meantime, to cover those costs, someone has to put in the working capital which creates a functional gap. All this without a streamlined policy for MSMEs is not feasible.
The minimum revenue threshold is another thing that could be reconsidered. It dictates that bidding companies should have already done business at certain levels/ with certain actors which disqualifies innovative start-ups.
In an industry where development takes 2-3 years, demonstrating the bigger picture to MSME bidders in platforms like iDEX Challenge is crucial. It tells the story of where the challenges are taking the industry, allowing companies to plan better and to be better prepared for the commercialization timeline-obsolete technology cycle race.
India – US Collaboration Avenues
There is an opportunity for India and the US to integrate commercial innovation into the national security space architectures but it must be done in a way that ensures integrated commercial solutions are available during times of peace and war.
Military space cooperation would require actors on both sides to jump through many hoops of bureaucracy and export controls. But in the commercial space sector there are opportunities for direct links between Indian and American commercial entities. Cooperating in launches would also be a huge step forward. Any launch vehicle is a complex integration of multiple subsystems, and cooperation on this front has to currently go through the hiccup of International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) even for elements purely on the commercial side. There is a need for classification reform in the prime and non-prime sectors to enable this cooperation.
In terms of speed of India-US collaborations or export/import regulation, space should not be seen in isolation to the overall relationship. The bilateral relationship and exchanges in the defense sector are nascent across all domains. Trust builds with each successful project. As the frequency of exchanges increases, the familiarity will too.
Call for a Space Policy Ecosystem and Global Standards
At the policy front, governments need to employ full-time workers in positions tasked with creating standards for space. By and large these standards are set by either engineers pulled away from a project or bureaucrats tangentially related to the space domain but who carry a separate full-time portfolio. Think tanks dedicated to this cause would also be useful, perhaps funded by the Quad.
The relationship between in-space cooperation and intelligence cooperation is a close one. Cyber and information security is key to enabling a functional space-cooperation relationship so that classified information and technology practices can be exchanged in a timely manner.
The lack of imagination from the industry is a bigger hiccup than export controls because both governments are actively facilitating collaborations now. The companies are unable to identify exactly what obstacles they want the Government to address and their rationale is that even this identification takes certain billable hours with legal teams that do not make sense to the cost of that project. Outside of that, the number of days required for processing has substantially reduced; so red tapism is no longer valid.
